Karine Jean-Pierre, Pres. Biden’s press secretary, tries to explain away Biden’s search for a knowingly deceased congresswoman.
Watch buffoons in the national media and the upper rungs of the government sound technocratic, which means that they claim to be the inheritors of the “science”, the “experts”, and the “best and brightest” from our academic bubbles in the grip of, truth be told, cultural extremism. And watch our life get measurably worse.
Politics corrupts judgment, and no more fevered environment exists than one just before an election. Today, the word “transition” is employed to hide many sins. Just a week ago, Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s press secretary, announced, “. . . what we are seeing . . . is a transition to a more steady and stable growth.” Transition frequently crosses her lips on nearly everything that could foretell troubled times ahead. Biden, the donkey party powerful, and blue-state potentates are also especially fond of the word. It’s their current favorite to sound wise.
The jargon is a reflex of progressivism. Progressivism built its reputation on replacing the compromises, clashing interests, “smoke-filled rooms”, and bargaining of messy democracy with the credentialed “expert”. They actually believed that society can be managed by fine-tuning, like a technician adjusting an old-style carburetor. A little turn of the fiscal and regulatory screw here and there and bliss will be upon us. So, if fighting climate change and pursuing social justice (ergo blatant racial favoritism) are your goals, an agency of degreed “experts” and appropriate decrees from on high will seamlessly float the people in the right direction without pain. It’s all a bunch of hooey.
Hundreds of millions of free souls will not be rigidly controlled by a claque of government employees who lack the humility of admitting that they don’t know half as much as they claim, and a good portion of what they do know is wrong. The economist Friedrich Hayek warned of the inherent “knowledge problem” in government. It’s playing out before our eyes.
“Transition” conceals a troubling winter. Fuel prices normally experience seasonal gyrations, but the Biden people raised the water level of those fluctuations by over half. Prices undulate at a rate of 50% to 100% over a year or two ago. Be prepared for a jump in electricity rates this winter on the east coast, Northeast, and other blue bubbles, which is not surprising given that they are most enthusiastic about rule by “expert” – all according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, an agency that is limited to measuring reality, and not to be confused with the “experts” of the climate change and equity freakouts.
“Transition” is often coupled with “soft landing”. President Clinton caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar, once parsed on the meaning of “is” in his perjury before a federal grand jury. The same is true for the treatment of “transition” and “soft landing” by the gaggle of progressives dominating the regime. The words are rhetorical cosmetic surgery for probable layoffs and business retrenchment. You don’t have to look far for proof. The economy only recently reached its pre-pandemic total employment numbers, which doesn’t take into account population growth. The laggard pace of employment screws up the unemployment rate. Vigorous job growth coming out of a shutdown by government fiat isn’t surprising. But a 3.7% unemployment rate out of a pool of adults shrunk by huge numbers opting out of the workforce makes the unemployment number almost superfluous.
Retrenchment is in the winds. Big Tech and others are beginning to trim some fat. Meta, Twilio, and Snap are jettisoning workers. Gap, Boeing, and Walmart are lopping administrative overhead. Real estate is taking a big hit as Wells Fargo, RE/MAX, and Redfin cut employees and agents as the Fed raises interest rates to combat another Fed-induced problem: inflation. And Biden and company still want to fight inflation – too much money chasing too few goods – by amazingly throwing more money at it. Never has a fire been successfully fought by pouring jet fuel on it.
Local businesses are hard it. The 2020 summer of riots didn’t help. Downtowns resemble ghost towns. Cities can’t proclaim a welcome mat for business when the sidewalks are open sewers and wanton theft, even serial assault, are ho-hum to district attorneys. Now we get to the cultural dimensions of “transition” and “soft landing”.
“Transition” to an “equity” society entails racial discrimination (against Asians and white males), lawlessness, crime victims, property destruction, XY-chromosome girls in XX-chromosome girls sports, and extremist indoctrination (eco-cultism, CRT, transgenderism, socialism) in the schools. No place is safe from the transitioners, not the home, not parenthood. Listen to Nikole Hannah-Jones – a symbol of the intersectionality of Black, female, and extremist cultural revolutionary – expounding on the danger of parents having a say in their children’s education (see below). It encapsulates the foolishness of “transition” and “soft landing” by “experts”.
Dropping the pretense of deceptive verbiage would be a great start. The so-called reformers are revolutionaries and should be forced to lay out their vision of how to create the new person for their new world. It’s totalitarian in scope. They need to lay their cards on the table so we are aware that the “soft landing” will be hard and brutal, as all such movements have proven to be. It won’t end well.
RogerG
Read more here:
* The U.S. Energy Information Agency’s electricity rate forecast of Sept. 7, 2022 can be found at https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php .
* Jim Geraghty of National Review wrote an excellent piece on the subject in “The Economy Is Starting to Buckle”, National Review Online, Sept, 26, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-economy-is-starting-to-buckle/ .
* The normally suspect Bloomberg News announced the achievement of the employment milestone In “Employment in US Has Finally Exceeded Its Pre-Pandemic Level” at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-02/employment-in-us-has-finally-exceeded-its-pre-pandemic-level?leadSource=uverify%20wall .
The normally sensible Brit Hume on Bret Baier’s Special Report on Wednesday (3/16/22) asked the salient question on Ukraine: What is our national interest in Ukraine? It’s the same question every government has to ask when facing an international dilemma such as this one. For Hume, his inflection and posture inferred skepticism about a major US national interest in support of Ukraine. Take a tour around much of the Fox News primetime lineup and you’ll get commentary heavily dowsed in doubt with some bordering on complete rejection of any. Are they right? No, a hundred times “No”.
In addressing the query, one factor corrupts the popular media that influences much public opinion. A competent answer rarely lends itself to cable show compression – i.e., soundbites. The setting favors the cynic and hampers proponents. It’s much easier for a detractor to ask the question and force proponents to contrive a response to fit 10 seconds. Is that how we want overriding issues to be treated? Hardly.
Any intelligent consideration of the national interest in Ukraine begs particular questions. What would Europe and the world be like after a Russian conquest of Ukraine? Would it be a friendlier world for the US? An additional and related question: What would Russia under a reenergized Putin be like after a Ukraine conquest? Is a cooperative, agreeable, and contented Putin a likelihood? Oh, what will the CCP be left to think?
We study history for its clues on human nature.
As such, one could be excused for having a dim view of our prospects in this return to a world of contending hyper-powers. History is not encouraging. It’s rhyming in the cadences of the 1930’s. Once again, we have revanchist powers in Europe and Asia, and they have the additional liability of having nuclear arsenals. Their actions should focus the mind in a sterner way than a border dispute between two small satraps. A bear leaves more evidence of its passage than a mouse. Watch for the bear, not the mouse.
Trundling to the way-back machine, fascist Germany and Italy weren’t satisfied with the Rhineland and Abyssinia. Japan wasn’t made sanguine with Manchuria. League of Nations protests and sanctions didn’t halt Imperial Japan’s behavior and the Munich appeasement of forcing Czechoslovakia to surrender the Sudetenland didn’t whet Hitler’s appetite. The West had dug itself into such a deep hole by 1939 that it took six years and 75-80 million deaths, 3% of the world’s population, to bring the malefactors to heel.
Signing ceremony for the Axis Powers Tripartite Pact, January 1940; seated at front left (left to right) are Japan’s Ambassador Saburō Kurusu (leaning forward), Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Galeazzo Ciano and Germany’s Führer Adolf Hitler (slumping in his chair).Putin and Xi meet in June of 2018.
A new axis has taken shape reminding us of that old one. The 1930’s edition began in 1936 with treaties of cooperation among the serial aggressors and ended with the full-blown military Tripartite Pact in 1940. Acting in historical lockstep, Putin and Xi met on February 4 to announced a bipartite pact with world-hogging spheres of influence. The joint statement reads as follows:
“The new inter-State relations between Russia and China are superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation . . . . Russia and China stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions, intend to counter interference by outside forces in the internal affairs of sovereign countries under any pretext, oppose colour [sic] revolutions, and will increase cooperation in the aforementioned areas.”
They are angling for a resuscitated Soviet Empire for Putin and Xi’s rendition of Japan’s old Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere – “Asia for the Asians”, er CCP, so to speak.
And, simultaneously, as in that bygone era, we have a recurrence of an anti-war Right. We are quite familiar with the Left’s aversion for anything nationally muscular. They have a habitual zeal for opposition to the military and for the peddling of facile “peace” – of the better-red-than-dead variety – and the accompanying disparagement of any nation deserving of our sympathies. Such was evident on the 1930’s Right – Lindbergh’s America First Committee and leading congressional figures like Sen. Robert Taft (R, Ohio) – and increasingly appears to be true today. Scan the Right’s media offerings (Fox News primetime, Newsmax, and a host of other digital offerings) and you’ll see the smearing of Ukraine, fears of a military-industrial complex, the dangers of spilt American blood on foreign soil, and the hyperbole of a new World War III at every turn. At the end of the day, it’s a repackaged 1930’s playbook that calls for unilateral abandonment of a national interest if a foreign thug threatens.
The now-worn playbook shows in a diminished military capacity, both then and now. Today’s defense doctrine went from simultaneously fighting two wars to one. In order to fulfill the “pivot to Asia”, we had relegated ourselves to abandoning Afghanistan. Defense spending as a share of GDP gradually declined from 9% in the 1960s to under 4% today. We are doing our best to recreate the circumstances that led to Pearl Harbor. This time, we may not have the time to build up. As Congress begins the debate of a new draft law, the nukes had already left their silos and advanced divisions of the People’s Liberation Army have landed on the shores of Taiwan and the Senkaku Islands.
So, how will a disquisition like this one be shoehorned into a Laura Ingraham or Joy Reid segment? Hmmm.
Something lurks behind the paralyzing alarms of our celebrities on the Right (and maybe the Left). One thing might be the hankering for the type of international dealings of the sailing-ship era. It was a time when oceans blocked anyone but the most capable and determined assailant. The 21 miles of the English Channel’s Dover Strait proved to be insurmountable even for Napoleon at his height of power. Today, an airborne division can be dropped on Albany in a matter of hours; 30 minutes is the time from an ICBM launch from its Aleysk silo to Chicago (faster for sub-launched and hyper-sonics); WMD can come in a suitcase; and cyber invasions to bollix our grid are nearly instantaneous from Beijing keystroke to PG&E. Someone tell Tucker Carlson.
Russia’s new mach 9 Tsirkon hypersonic missile
Secondly, in a display of obeisance to simple-minded Trump-talk, they have a 1950’s template for America. It was a time when the U.S. was riding high, alone in the world, as Europe and much of Asia were in rubble. In a way, they are right to admire the time because those were the halcyon days before environmentalist triumphalism and the regnant belief that federal spending can cure deep-seated personal problems, alongside its attendant and economy-dragging trillion-dollar deficits. But, by clinging to Trump’s rhetorical apron strings, they take it much further in bashing a trade deficit that neither he nor they understand. In a clear example of foot-shooting, their targets include trading relationships with our allies and the ones that we’ll need to counter China’s latest edition of Asia for the Asians. It’s as if they chucked Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Statecraft for Dummies out the window and are winging it.
It won’t end well after the rampages and the torching of 12% of US GDP (US exports’ contribution to GDP). Gazing back into the history, the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff and the Great Depression share the same womb.
Mothballed US Navy ships in Suisun Bay, Ca.
The doom of repeating history, in Descartes famous words, looms large. Don’t expect expansionistic predators-with-nukes to be impressed by an economic and military retreat to fortress America. We will quickly learn that the world as a playground for powerful rogues will not be to our liking. We’ve seen it before, déjà vu all over again. Thus, we have a national interest in keeping Putin and the CCP at bay, if for no other reason than to avoid the accusation of flunking high school History. The sooner we discredit the anti-war Right and Left and its incipient isolationism, the sooner our national interest will come into focus.
Let’s hope at this momentous hour that we don’t shrug our shoulders and say under our breath, c’est la vie. We will live to regret it if we do.
While ruminating on the latest thought-fad emanating from the Left, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), I was reminded of the tendency of people to hide their real intentions behind a flurry of academic jargon. Thus, the convoluted and incoherent MMT. Economists – left, right and center – have dubbed it “Calvinball” (Paul Krugman), “not ready for primetime” (Scott Summer), “sounded like lunacy” (Michael Strain), and “a political [not economic] manifesto” (report for France’s central bank). Frankly, MMT boils down to this: if the government wants to do something, go ahead and print the money and do it. No problem, the MMT priesthood would sing in chorus. Everything will be hunky-dory.
But what are they really after? Pure and simple, they want a humongous government with the power to tax, regulate, and spend at will; no restraints; socialism. MMT is just another tangled oratorical path to get there. Please, fans of socialism, cut the crap.
The same mental gymnastics are at work on the right. Events in Ukraine have exposed a segment of the right’s own rhetorical curtain. Tucker Carlson babbles on about “just asking questions”, “neocons”, “Ukrainian corruption”, “World War III”, “Americans dying”, and “America first”. Laura Ingraham joins the chorus. What are they really after?
The normally sensible Mollie Hemingway also seems to practice this form of mental subterfuge when talking about Ukraine. In a recent interview on the Hugh Hewitt show, she incessantly rambled about “knowing the risks” of US support for Ukraine, as if the thought was original to her; nobody but her is aware of it. But everybody intuitively does it when doing simple things like deciding to go to an ATM in crime-ridden LA under DA Gascon or proposing to prick the nose of the CCP with tariffs (they’ve got nukes too).
What’s up? Two motivations lie buried in the verbiage: they are paralyzed in fear of Russia and have a hankering for a “fortress America” national defense strategy. Goatherders with boxcutters (9/11) proved the latter to be foolish. On the former, I fail to understand the gripping dread of Putin’s nukes over, say, those of Chairman Xi. Tucker, Laura, and Mollie are gung-ho in respect to China and have said so ad nauseam, but can’t bring themselves to support actions to forestall a mauling by a power wishing to resuscitate the Soviet empire on a continent historically beset by world-shattering aggressors. Speaking of spent blood and treasure to put thugs back in the box, recall WWI and WWII?
Hardly does an episode go by without two straw-man choices to bolster the cognitive inanity. Tucker presents the choices as either staying out, completely out, or body bags/nuked American cities. What happened to simply arming our friends? Putin and Xi do it regularly, and American soldiers have paid the price in such disparate places as Syria, Fellujah, and the Hindu-Kush. The Tucker-to-Laura axis’s response would be “no more forever-wars” or run and hide after, as Mollie would have it, tortuously “assessing the risks”.
The thinking boggles the mind. They are quick to “assess the risks” of a bungled Afghan bugout but have no desire to “assess the risks” of a bludgeoned Ukraine, and possible defeat, as we sit idly by, safe in our “fortress America”.
Which brings to mind another hidden motive: pure cult-of-personality politics. Trump-love could be clouding their eyesight and mind. Biden, who defeated their master, did the Afghan bugout and is at the helm when Putin unleashed his doddering Wehrmacht on the Ukraine. They’re quick to blame Biden’s Afghanistan-appeasement for Putin’s invasion – and they’d be right – while at the same time they hawk appeasement in regards to Ukraine. Putin saw Kabul airport and Xi is watching Ukraine. A failure to stop Putin at the borders of the Ukraine could lead to a failure to stop Xi at the shores of Taiwan. If so, we’ll be really forced into “fortress America”. A self-fulfilled prophecy anyone, one not likely to be satisfying to most Americans?
I wish that they’d get their appeasement angles straight before they blather to us.
The modern punditry class is a disgrace. Previously, most of the sensible among us had no recourse in legacy media. The networks, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, AP are mostly lefty propaganda organs. Now, it turns out, the primetime lineup on Fox News can’t be trusted. All of them prove that human fallibility is evident everywhere and academic degrees, party registration, ideology, race, gender, age, and telegenic qualities accord no fix. Fact.
Really, Tucker, Laura, and Mollie, tell us what actually lurks behind your wordiness. If it’s abject fear of Putin, say it. If it’s a sincere belief in the veracity of Russian propaganda, say it. If it’s a derivative of knee-jerk Trump-love, say it. If it’s an undying faith in oceans as our best defense, say it. If it’s a secret admiration of Putin as a fellow nationalist-populist, say it. If it’s the fright of “forever wars” trumping all other thoughts, say it. And, by all means, cut the crap.
In 2001, upon meeting Russia’s Vladimir Putin for the first time in Slovenia, Pres. George W. Bush famously said that he looked into Putin’s eyes and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Apparently, Bush was bromanced by a heartrending Putin tale from his youth of his mother giving him a cross that survived a fire at the family dacha. Later, Vice-President Cheney chortled that when he saw Putin, “I think KGB, KGB, KGB”. Bush’s outpourings of sympathy were corrected by Cheney’s blunt realism.
We need more of Cheney’s therapeutic realism regarding all sorts of misguided beliefs that are eviscerating our country. One such assemblage of mind-junk running amok is environmentalism. This thing is an “ism” and not to be confused with its root, the environment. It’s a vast social engineering project that rivals anything bursting forth from the mind of Karl Marx, for whom it is related. After decades of persistent persuasion throughout the culture, it has settled into our myopic but comfortable middle class. We are willing our own demise, and the historical corrective in the form of a sober middle class has checked out of prudence and into folly, or so it seems.
Though, be mindful of the universal caveat: to be certain, not all of the middle class, but a sizeable chunk in varying degrees. One must avoid the sophistry of the woke in assuming a homogeneity of thought in a group arbitrarily defined by some external, physical factor (income, race, ethnicity, gender, etc., etc.).
The ”ism” is an example of a belief system every bit as straitjacketing as anything found in The Communist Manifesto, a kind of theology without an afterlife. Instead, the surrogate afterlife is a materialist utopia, a pie in the sky. The grand scheme begins with the acolytes’ favorite diagnosis of what ails us in the form of human eco-disruptions that have allegedly damaged our entire existence, us personally, and all our surroundings. The prescription requires the true believers to take control of the state to engineer a better human being for a better world. Devastation, though, is history’s likeliest verdict.
Climate change doctrines are the latest infatuation which has been used, for instance, to wreck our domestic energy industry and begin the coercive reengineering of our existence. Fact: no reliable energy, welcome to the stone age. And solar panels and windmills won’t cut it, so don’t go there. The eco-fanatics’ dream, however, will translate into the reality of dependence on Saudi monarchs, Iran’s mullahs, Putin, and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro. Welcome to national subservience to imperial thugs and welcome to chronic retreat and defeat. President Biden is the latest figurehead trying to lead us into this new catastrophe.
Events in Eastern Europe – Ukraine in particular – have exposed the problem. We are in the midst of a massive federal, state, and local effort, led by the feds, to turn topsy-turvy our way of life in pursuit of almost anything labeled “sustainable” in 2,000-page Green New Deals (GND) while at the same time we are beset with the aggressions of Russia and Red China who are threatening to tear apart our alliances and trade relationships. We are pulled toward the amateurish visions of AOC as we are stretched in the opposite direction to stand up to tyrannical aggressions. It’s a two-fer for a beating. Lincoln’s “house divided against itself cannot stand” should ring in our ears.
The fact that the middle class, mostly white collar, has largely bought into this secular faith is evident everywhere. It can be heard from the pulpit to the classroom.
Groups who are the zealous spearhead of the movement notice their narrow demographic appeal in the white collar, urban/suburban/exurban, middle to super-rich cluster. The Sierra Club, Wisconsin chapter, admits it: “The lack of diversity and inclusion amongst staff and members of environmental organizations is a key component to their difficulty in effectively combating environmental justice issues.” In 2015, the group’s national governing body felt compelled to kneel before the cliché of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” to paper over the obvious truth of the group’s cramped attractiveness (sierra club 2015 diversity equity and inclusion pdf).
Pew Research points to the same constricted demography. Using Dem/Rep breakdowns as the metric – since GNDs aren’t in the Republican playbook – we get a sense of who’s rallying to the flag of the firebrands. The Democratic Party is, after all, their institutional home. Democrat strength has been rising in the same demographic wherein eco-activists draw their legions: white, college educated, and urban/suburban. These aren’t any kind of Caucasoids; they are whites of the other two characteristics.
For blue collars to join, they must either be confused or suicidal.
This isn’t your grandpa’s middle class. For a sizeable portion of them, they see the world as an urban park due to their unfamiliarity with anything else. Ensconced in their suburban bungalow, or coastal dwelling, or exclusive condo, or gentrified brownstone, they are far removed from the kind of people who make the stuff of their life possible. Distance culturally, morally, socially, geographically, and economically, sometimes over multiple generations, colors both their perspectives and profound ignorance. It’s easy for them to complain of the high price of housing but then support environmental policies that jack up the price of construction materials and strangle the supply of homes. To them, the national forests are a park, not a possible source of 2X4 studs, and the more land under the control of the Nature Conservancy the better in their mind. The monumental incongruency is startling.
Environmental activists protest outside of the Harvard Club where Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was scheduled to speak, June 20, 2017 in New York City.
Do you think the nations who wish us harm – yes, we do have them – are oblivious to the presence of a demographic fifth column in our midst? As Biden would say, “Come on, man!” In the 1970s and 80s, we called Soviet morale-busting campaigns disinformation. They called it dezinformatsiya which The Great Soviet Dictionary of the era defined as “false information with the intention to deceive public opinion.” The 1980’s Operation Infektion attempted to convince the world and us that our government invented HIV/AIDS in order to sap our will to resist them. President Reagan got a full blast of it when he countered a Soviet military buildup in Europe and resisted Soviet adventurism around the world.
Today’s Kremlin wouldn’t be continuing the practice if there wasn’t an audience for it, as there was for the Nuclear Freeze and peace movements 40 years ago. Former Soviet KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin would be very familiar with this staple of Soviet war-by-other-means and is evidently using it. One of the biggest foreign boosters of John Kerry’s climate change hucksterism is Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council. Patrushev goes further in hawking American woke capitalism. Is he doing it out of pure altruism? Quoting Biden again, “Come on, man!” He knows, and we should know, that climate-change apocalyptics and social justice flimflammery only cripples us. What better way to advance Putin’s national interests than to cheer John Kerry’s galivanting escapades and The Squad’s congressional agenda? Weaken your adversary and warm up the tanks is a well-worn tactic.
Nikolai Patrushev
The Kremlin gets traction with the hooey because many white collars are habitually open to the jive. When will these urbanistas realize that they can’t have a safe and prosperous country alongside blackouts and escalating utility bills? Electric cars, or electric anything, isn’t going to deliver 45,000 pounds of produce to their favorite Whole Foods outlet. Their Beemers and Subarus can’t be made without the liquid residue of primordial jungles. The stuff of fossil fuels surrounds them at a time when they are trying to kill it off. It’s one of the purest examples of economic self-negation imaginable.
We have more than a Left problem. We have a middle-class problem. The two intersect at environmentalism and ensure the atrophy of our economy, our national resolve, and compromise the defense of our national interests. No better word is available than “betrayal” . . . or maybe stupidity.
2/24/22 UPDATE: It has begun. Russia has initiated a full-scale assault on Ukraine from the east, south, and north. The following is my synopsis of the contributions of two Fox News celebrities to the broad sense of confusion and myopia in America regarding Russia and the Ukraine.
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If you haven’t noticed, Putin is at it again, and our hapless president is bewildered and stumbling toward appeasement, or maybe just plain impotence. Now, here’s the kicker: some on the right are also ambivalent and would be, quite honestly, content with the results of Biden’s passivity. Fox News’s Neville Carlson (alias Tucker Chamberlain) is exhibit #1. He’s Fox News’s #1 offering and it shows. If you turn at least a casual ear to talk radio you’ll hear the occasional caller spout the latest lines, almost word for word, from Carlson about “neocons”, Ukrainian corruption, our undefended southern border vetoing any efforts to assist our allies, Carlson’s adaptation of Code Pink’s “no blood for oil” chant, and other reformulations of old rhetorical handles.
Sadly, he’s not alone on my side of the political ledger, the right. On Tuesday (2/22/22), he was joined by Laura Ingraham in a tag-team revitalization of Lindbergh’s America First Committee, which by the way in its initial form died over the burning hulks of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. If you’re interested, here’s a good dose of Tucker-thought on Russia-Ukraine. It’s entertaining but incoherent bombast.
Carlson repeatedly asks, “. . . how does intervening in Ukraine help the core interests of the United States?” Honestly, substitute Ukraine for any number of different countries and you’ll probably get any number of answers to his query. And prevalent answers would be different depending on the era. One answer would prevail in a time when long-distance travel was a death-defying journey, and before the harnessing of electricity and artificial power and Adam Smith’s depiction of the glories of free trade. George Washington could understandably advise the young nation “to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.” But two-month delivery times for a letter across the Atlantic is an alien experience for today. Things move quickly – sometimes instantaneously – and their impacts travel at the same speed. Missiles, hijacked airliners turned into missiles, cyber-attacks, blue-water navies, strategic bombers, and international supply chains make the point.
Let’s ask Tucker’s question in 1931 before Japan’s invasion of China; instead of the Donbas, it’s Manchuria. Oh, what about Mussolini’s 1935 “minor incursion” into Ethiopia? Lest I forget, we could level the question at the “little corporal’s” swallowing up of Czechoslovakia, and furthermore Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. That takes up the Axis connection to Tuckers’ question. 405,000 US deaths later (75-80 million worldwide), we had peace that didn’t last long. And then we’re back to mankind’s annoyingly familiar flawed nature.
Moving forward in time, what core interest did we have in Korea? Or, for that matter, West Berlin? Cuba? Nicaragua? Grenada? Kuwait? The profusion of instances answers the question. It’s an interrelated world of multifaceted interests and impacts. A leading statesman has to pick and choose, not ignore and hide.
To remind you of what a statesman sounds like, President Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech of 1983 provides an educational contrast. Tucker no doubt would refer to him as a “neocon”.
Regarding Ukraine, is it in America’s interest to stand pat as the Soviet Union is revived? Ukraine is the vital piece in Putin’s reconstruction project. It was the breadbasket for the empire yet also distinct, so much so that Russification, the policy of transplanting millions of Russians in the country, was active for a couple of centuries or more. For Russia, if they can’t make Ukrainians Russian, they’ll make Ukraine Russian. First-language Russian speakers (14% of the population) are a product of this ethnic imperialism. They’re also the leverage for Putin to use tanks to complete the task that was interrupted by the USSR’s implosion.
The CCP is taking a page out of this dog-eared book by injecting Han Chinese into Xinjiang.
You’ll notice that I didn’t mention Vietnam in the litany of US interventions. It’s a sore spot, or embarrassment, for most Americans since we are said to have lost. But losing was a choice, not inevitable. Many decisions were made to draw out the war, allow North Vietnam to stay in the fight, and prohibit US assistance to Saigon by Congressional order at the moment Hanoi’s tanks headed south. We saw similar choices throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama yanked US forces out of Iraq and we got ISIS. Biden yanked them out Afghanistan and we got Kabul airport and a descent into the 7th century and more terrorist sanctuaries. Choices, horrible choices, and not the only ones available.
ISIS mass executions in Syria, 2014.
Each time that we choose a new defeat, we’ll go through a period of national PTSD. It’s no different post-Iraq War (W’s edition) and Afghanistan. This time, it’s more than a revival of a McGovernite wing in the donkey party. The right has correspondingly rediscovered its inner-Robert Taft/Charles Lindbergh. Tucker and Ingraham speak in the manner of Lindbergh’s isolationism and Taft’s fear of internationalism. Lindbergh combined a retreat to fortress America and an extreme naivete about the character of the Reich Chancellery. Taft bristled at anything that smacked of a loss of US sovereignty, real or imagined. He found NATO troubling.
Ohio Senator Robert Taft speaks at Arlington National Cemetery in 1939. (Library of Congress)
Still, a catalyst was necessary to provoke a 180-degree turn for the mediagenic stars of Fox News who were past boosters of the War of Terror. To be fair, I’m not aware of Tucker’s stance at the time of Bush’s invasion of Iraq but we have Laura’s confession. She got a whiff of populism, Trump style, and was intoxicated. Trump had no statesmanlike competence to exhibit on the debate stage in 2016 so he resorted to insults and boilerplate attacks on Jeb Bush that drew from the worst of the Bush-lied-people-died period of Democrat demagoguery. Everyone pre-invasion assumed Saddam had WMD, including the dictator himself, or so he said. Trump refashioned the canard in the language of illicit “forever wars” as a campaign slogan and cudgel against Jeb Bush and his new bogeyman of “the establishment” (synonymous with anyone in opposition to Trump). It’s a familiar feature in the Trump Brigades’ talking points.
And the slogans thrived, going so far as to mutilate any original meaning. RHINO morphed from liberal Republican to anyone opposing Trump. Neocon changed from the architects of Reagan’s foreign policy to, again, anyone antagonistic to Trump. “Forever wars” came out of Trump’s mouth as easily as it did any Democrat sealing the doom of South Vietnam. A person’s stance on Trump became the arbiter of meaning in our political lingua franca.
From the time of Trump’s ascension, Trump and the Fox News primetime lineup trundled in unison into a fixation on getting out, and staying out. Trump, with Ingraham and Carlson in tow, tried a pullout in Iraq but he’s got an ISIS problem. The complication of ISIS extended into Syria so he’ll have to eradicate these blood-thirsty savages even as he tries to abandon the Kurds to Erdogan’s new Ottoman Empire. Trump detours and his fits and starts abound. Assad gasses his own people and Trump orders missile attacks. It’s a messy world, but he’s determined to get out of Afghanistan with nothing but cheerleading from Tucker and Laura.
Trump’s Doha Agreement (signed Feb. 29, 2020) was minted in the same manner as the previous negotiated sellouts: the victims were absent from the room. Chamberlain/Daladier cut a deal with Hitler on Czechoslovakia that excluded the Czechs. Nixon/Kissinger reached agreement with the North Vietnamese with only a perfunctory role for the South. The Kabul government was at most a wall flower to Pompeo and the Taliban. The kink in the grand diplomatic design was that Trump wouldn’t be around to see it through. Biden was elected and, true to form, he flubbed the flight out of the country.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Head of Taliban’s Political office in Qatar Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar on the sidelines of the opening ceremony of the Afghanistan Peace Negotiations in Doha, 2020.
Remember that Trump and Biden were united in their enthusiasm for getting out and not in the least worried about its return to terrorist sanctuary and the loss of a strategic asset.
Now it’s Ukraine’s turn. The same “forever wars” vitriol that our Fox News celebrities and Trump retroactively aimed at W and his people would be directed at anyone wanting to stop Putin. Epithets are summoned to smear the object of our sympathies. Ukraine is vilified as corrupt and not a democracy. Well, yes, Ukraine is corrupt, like the rest of the old USSR post-breakup, but is it more corrupt than, say, our politicians who enter office middle class but leave oligarch-rich? Pelosi, can we examine your account books?
Tucker is fond of saying that the country is an affront to democracy because it banned political parties and jails the opposition. He’s only half right. The other half is the existence of the country under the pall of Russian domination. After the fall of the Soviet empire, “Russian interference” was a recurring feature of the Ukrainian political scene; and before it, Stalin’s Holodomor (1932-3) was as much genocide as it was a byproduct of central planning. Ukrainian elections were continually beset by massive Russian intrusions. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004) was a popular uprising to throw out a Putin puppet in the presidency. It was followed in 2013 by the Euromaidan protests to force a realignment away from Russia and toward the West. All throughout, Putin’s operatives were active with money and guidance to contort elections. Russia’s $40,000 in Facebook ads in 2016 in our country pale in significance. The country has been in a near continuous struggle to be independent of Russia. Life under nonstop foreign pressure isn’t healthy for the fragile elements of democracy.
Combatants walk in a procession as they attend the memorial service and the funeral of Aleksey Mozgovoi, a militant leader of the separatist self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, and his subordinates in the town of Alchevsk in Luhansk region, Ukraine, May 27, 2015. (Photo: Reuters)
Anyway, Ukraine isn’t in the same league with Putin’s Russia when it comes to sheer political ghoulishness. Enterprising but critical journalists disappear at an amazing clip. Anna Politkovskaya (2006) and Natalia Estemirova (2009) are two of many of Putin’s victims. The list of the murdered for being so impetuous as to stand athwart Putin is so long that the Russian human rights group Memorial (now illegal) maintains a catalogue called “Last Address”. Political homicides aren’t limited to Russia as the spate of overseas poisonings illustrates. Exile is no refuge from the guy.
Do you think Carlson is cognizant of these realities? It’s hard to say. I certainly don’t hear any pushback on the torrent of claims coming out of the Kremlin. Putin believes that the Ukraine is an illegitimate country. Does Carlson? It has more legitimacy than Russia’s claim on it. Russia’s control over most if it didn’t happen till Peter the Great in the 18th century. Prior to that, the nation shape shifted under the control of the Duchy of Lithuania, Poland, Austria-Hungary, and the Golden Horde (Tartars), Russia arriving on the scene later. If not for Russia, the country might have joined the family of eastern European nations much earlier.
Laura’s stance was obvious when she became euphoric from the fumes of Trump’s populism. Right now, another scent is in the air. It is the whiff of 1938 Czechoslovakia and later Poland. Both were creatures of the Versailles Treaty and thusly held in ill-repute by an ascending German leader in much the same manner as Putin holds Ukraine. The two eastern European countries were just stepping stones on the way to lebensraum. In like manner, the Ukraine is an important cog on the path to reassembling the USSR, or Russian Empire, or whatever label you wish to apply to Putin’s Slavic lebensraum. Laura, is lebensraum an appropriate tool for satisfying territorial appetites?
Seriously, are a country’s borders to be decided by the ambitions of dictators? If so, say goodbye to Taiwan and South Korea. Welcome to the Palestinian Caliphate, a gift of Iran’s mullahs. So, what’s our interest in the Ukraine? It’s to prevent the resuscitation of imperial ambitions in a region critical to our well-being, Europe. If we stood up to this thug, we might have more going for us in confronting Xi than a pell-mell run for the hills in Afghanistan and the Ukraine scalp for Putin.
The next shoe to drop: Taiwan. Partially, America’s fatigue in the Middle East gave us Trump, who gave us Doha. America’s fatigue with Trump gave us Biden which led to the Afghanistan bugout, and much else that plagues us. It didn’t take Putin long (5 months) to initiate the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II. Xi’s been watching, and has a checklist with Hong Kong marked and followed by the Senkaku Islands, the South China Sea, Taiwan, and worldwide hegemony. Debacles unleash tyrants, and so will a retreat into fortress America and a handwringing paralysis every time there’s talk of a venture beyond our shores.
Ticker Carlson in early December when he raised the possibility of supporting Russia in its threats against the Ukraine.
Last night (1/20/22), I exploded – not literally, but emotionally. Tucker Carlson performed his now-familiar jeremiad against US overseas intervention. This time, it’s about US support for Ukraine. This guy appears to be so scarred by our recent “forever wars” that he can’t bring himself to ardently oppose naked aggression of the kind that has been abundantly on display throughout history with all their horrifying consequences. Carlson reminds me of Édouard Daladier of France and Neville Chamberlain of the United Kingdom, eager to avoid the bloodbath of World War I, hopping planes to Munich to sell out Czechoslovakia in 1938. Just replace Ukraine for Czechoslovakia.
British statesman and prime minister Neville Chamberlain (1869 – 1940) at Heston Airport on his return from Munich after meeting with Hitler, making his ‘peace in our time’ address. (photo: Central Press)
An accurate film about this disgraceful page in history appeared in 1988, “Munich: A Peace of Paper”. If you watch carefully, the parallels with events on Ukraine’s border are eye-opening. Please watch it if you have an hour to spare. It’s well worth it.
In the lead up to the invasion, Hitler infiltrated the German-speaking Czech population with his sponsorship of the Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei, SdP) and subsidized paramilitary and militia groups in the country. Hitler massed troops and conducted military exercises to raise tensions to incite an excuse to invade. Sound familiar, familiar to Putin’s activities along Russia’s border with Ukraine?
Daladier and Chamberlain traveled in a panic to Munich to cut a deal to desperately avoid war. They delayed war by sacrificing Czech territory to Germany, the part of Czechoslovakia with the best natural defenses against a German invasion, the so-called Sudetenland. Within seven months, Hitler took the rest of the country. Disgraceful.
From left to right: Neville Chamberlain, Daladier, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Galeazzo Ciano before signing the Munich Agreement. (Wikimedia Commons)
All of it was a prelude to the Nazi-Soviet pact and the invasion of Poland and the onset of WWII with its 60-85 million dead. Of course, our predecessors could have continued to evade war by following the Tucker Doctrine of “Why should Americans shed their blood for a group of German-speaking Czechs?” The US did and stayed on the sidelines till a much larger sacrifice was required.
The fact is, no one is calling for the introduction of the 101st Airborne into the Ukraine. Carlson’s predicate of Americans dying for the Ukraine is a straw man. The airlift of military supplies to the Ukraine doesn’t mean the US is at war with Russia. It means that we are doing what Putin and the CCP do regularly: support their foreign allies. We would be simply empowering Ukrainians to make Russians die for their country, all without US troops.
Hitler made a career of portraying Germany as a victim of Versailles and was surrounded by the “predatory” Allies. Carlson parrots Putin’s identical complaints about NATO. The Allies came together before the World Wars for the same reason that Poland, the Baltic States, and Ukraine are seeking the protective umbrella of NATO. For the former, it was fear of an aggressive and expansionistic Germany. For the latter, they have an understandable fear of the Kremlin seeking to reassemble the Soviet Empire. Their history is littered with Russian invasions, conquests, and depredations.
Russian tanks, artillery, armoured vehicles and trucks situated on the border with Ukraine at Valuyki, Belgorod Oblast. (Pictures: Google Earth)Russian tanks massed on the border with Ukraine in March 2020.The Russian paramilitary group known as the Wolves’ Hundred – “the little green men” – with their commander Evgeny Ponomaryov in the foreground, block the road near the checkpoint not far from Slavyansk, in eastern Ukraine, April 20, 2014 (photo: Maxim Dondyuk)
How calloused and duplicitous can a person be to exclaim, as Carlson did in an earlier broadcast, “Why don’t we take Russia’s side?” Indeed, why didn’t we take the Axis side? Either a moral obtuseness or outright ignorance is at work in the minds of some of our celebrities in front of a camera.
In 2021, Carlson was gung-ho about getting out of Afghanistan. We did and gave up a strategic outpost on the flank of our chief adversary, the CCP. Now, we’re worried about Red Chinese nuclear-tipped hyper-sonics and East Asia as a CCP empire. In 2019, Carlson favored a double-crossing of our Kurdish allies to the Turks who are equally enthralled by a return to Ottoman greatness. There doesn’t appear to be a US intervention that he won’t oppose. The parallels with history are too obvious to ignore.
Yet, he does. Wait for it: you’ll hear talk-radio callers parrot the line almost word-for-word. A significant segment of the right will fall for the nonsense. If Carlson has his way, Reagan’s famous dictum, “Trust but verify”, will be shoved to the side for “Get out and stay out”. This won’t end well.
Eviscerate: verb; to deprive something of its essential content.
Well, here we are, 9/11 twenty years later. The event is a two-decade saga bookended by an aerial assault killing nearly 3,000 people and an ignominious August 2021 retreat from Afghanistan. 9/11 is more than just that horrible day at the start of the new millennium. The saga as it played out came to signify something far more disturbing. We are no longer a nation capable of great, heroic deeds. We are eviscerated of moral fortitude. There’s nothing left in the tank of courage in the face of pain and adversity. Yes, we might never forget the day, but we also don’t really care enough to deal with a messy world with thousands of killers running around in it. They, the killers, have the fortitude; we don’t seem to have much of it. How did we get to this point?
From thisTo this
Of course, not all of us are so enfeebled. It’s just that it’s easier today to cobble together an electoral majority to cut and run. The 2020 election gave us two bugout enthusiasts at the top of the ballot.
What has drained us of that moral fortitude? Simply put, our brains have been crafted to not handle it. On the one hand, for most of us, the world beyond a person is the one presented by Hollywood. Honestly, people don’t read, really read and contemplate; movies, audio-visual is the talk of the town. In an earlier era of cinema, war is capture the flag. In addition, today, the prevalent story line is one of oppression. Combine the two and you have a debilitating impatience. And why defend a cruel nation with a cruel people anyway? After a few decades of nearly non-stop self-flagellation, who would want to come to its defense?
Hollywood, a main culprit in the slide, hasn’t been kind to adult reasoning. American cinema reached its apogee in the runup to World War II and its aftermath. WWII on the big screen and tv was implanted in a generation’s mind to such an extent that all subsequent wars were unfavorably compared to it. But what do you do in a world where your enemies have no uniforms and no borders and capital city to invade and seize? Religious, militant, and ideological movements aren’t defined by the attributes of a nation-state. Capture the flag seems hardly appropriate when a walk through a South Chicago neighborhood on a Saturday night is the more accurate metaphor.
On the international stage, organized murderous rage is more than a crime. It’s a national security threat, as we should well know. It’s an international crime wave demanding attention. Think of it as law enforcement without a Fifth Amendment and the Miranda warnings. Intelligence gathering, training up cadres in the neighborhoods, raids, and support for allies over the long haul shadow hunting down the mafia in drawn-out domestic law enforcement crusades. It’s a dirty business. We don’t have the stomach for it because we lack the persistence. Fighting organized international terrorism lacks the visual glory of victorious columns entering Germany.
Our entertainment industry certainly created false expectations about war, but it also worked to define us as a people in the most horrible way possible. As Christianity has receded, a racialist Marxism filled the vacuum. America as the oppressor of the “other” became settled doctrine throughout the culture. What started as the ramblings of Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, and others of the 1950’s, and continued into the 1960’s in the Port Huron Statement of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), eventually funneled its way into the faculty lounge. Tweed and tenure replaced long hair and jeans. The line of descent extended into all branches of the cultural commanding heights: business, education, entertainment, publishing, the press, fashion. The beautiful people had a neat set of fashionable views to foist on their fans; Big Sports, Big Soft Drinks, Big Airlines had a rationale for boycotting Georgia.
And the Democratic Party became the institutional focal point for the revolution. It’s one thing to organize conclaves to plan protests; it’s quite another to have the full force of one of the two great political parties to push the radical dogmas. The Biden campaign became the avatar for the neo-Marxist program. Once in power, radicalism became policy.
It permeates everywhere in DC. The normal bastions of American exceptionalism like the military showed signs of the corruption. Can anyone forget the comments of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, before Congress in June? He sounded like the academic half-wit Ibram X. Kendi or AOC when he confessed a desire to “understand white rage”. There can be nothing as dispiriting to the ranks as being called a mass of racists by their principal commander.
No, he can’t squirm out of it by saying that he was referring to the academic study of CRT. His comment assumed the factual presence of “white rage”, not the study of its hypothetical existence. Besides, it’s part of the heated political rhetoric of the radical left that has a home in the media and donkey party. Milley proved that he is a sellout to the radical program, and he may be proof of the radicalization in the command structure and the deep penetration of the radicalism in the Pentagon’s training academies. The crushing of national morale goes alongside the crushing of morale in the ranks of the people responsible for keeping the nation safe.
All of this has taken place in the span of the twenty years since 9/11. The bugout from Afghanistan was disgraceful. It’s hard to tell what Trump would have done if he had been the 2020 victor, despite the unconvincing after-the-fact denials by him and his apologists. There are too many Trump statements from his 2016 campaign, presidency, and the pre-August period to deny that Trump was anything but a loud devotee of withdrawal.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (C-L) meets with Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (C-R) in the Qatari capital Doha on November 21, 2020, (Photo by Patrick Semansky / POOL / AFP)
It’s hypothetical that he would have done it better. If anything, Trump and his people are proving the validity of Kennedy’s famous cliché after the Bay of Pigs disaster: “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” And nothing else.
The American people boxed themselves into a corner. Or more correctly, they allowed themselves to be boxed into the corner. A steady drumbeat to get out for over 5 years will have an effect on opinion polls.
But if you think about it, if it’s correct to assume that Trump would have done it better, it’s equally hypothetical to conclude that he would have left America in a better strategic position even if he won in 2020. A withdrawal is a withdrawal, and there’s nothing in the public record to indicate that he would have left a residual force. Everything coming out of his mouth and Twitter feed was a declaration to get everyone out. If anything, we hypothetically might have avoided the chaos at Kabul airport, but we still would have abandoned the country to the Taliban. Absent the steel of American logistics and air support, Afghan forces likely would have recapitulated their collapse under the guise of Trump. Afghanistan reverts back to 9/10, the Taliban and their movement’s deeply interconnected cousins – al-Qaeda and ISIS – rule the land, and America lost an important chess piece in the big game of national security.
So, here we are on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. The Taliban and their nest of jihadist allies are in charge. In a recent broadcast on Afghanistan’s national RTA television station, the Taliban celebrated our defeat with a honorific of the 9/11 attacks as “the result of the United States’ policy of aggression against the Muslim world.” They celebrate the “martyrs”. For us, we go into mourning for our dead, as all those who fought, bled, and died in that God-forsaken place must come to grips with personal sacrifices that were diminished by power-hungry politicos who have sold the country on the non-sequitur of retreat-as-victory.
We ran and all we have to show for it is mourning at memorials, the memory of a disgraceful exit, and graves and scars for our wonderful veterans. And the world after the retreat is a far more dangerous place for America and Americans.
Biden and his announced cabinet, January 2021.“Ship of Fools”, A. N. Mironov
It’s August 31, September 1 in Afghanistan, and we’re gone, lock, stock and barrel. Biden, Trump, and the primetime lineup of Fox News got what they wanted.
The “Ship of Fools” allegory is from Plato’s “The Republic” in which a ship is run by a dysfunctional crew. Democracy can magnify the “fools” presence among the personnel. But so do the other forms of governance: the “fools” can be a subservient peasant class and their overseers born into privilege, or a group of belligerent oafs, fired up by half-witted utopian visions, and gaining power through the barrel of a gun. Such has been the lot of mankind. We should know this oft-repeated story well.
Look at what democracy gave us in November 2020. A majority rejected the man-of-many-mean-tweets and narcissistic demagogue (a tautology?), and chose a doddering old fool, obsequious to the ruling radical left of his party. The result is the ruination that the radical left has always given the people who sadly have to live under their edicts. Prime example: the Afgan bugout.
I turn to H.L. Mencken for sarcastic aphorisms on democracy. Here’s some for your edification (courtesy of Mark J. Perry of AEI). Enjoy.
H. L. Mencken. (Henry L. Mencken.), a writer for the Baltimore Sun from 1905 to 1948. (Baltimore Sun Staff File Photo by Robert F. Kniesche). (Baltimore Examiner and Washington Examiner OUT ORG XMIT: BAL0909101149453148)
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Democracy, too, is a religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. (my personal favorite)
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
All government, of course, is against liberty.
That about sums it up. Elections are just as able to hand command of the rudder to fools as any other method.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (center) and major Taliban leaders in Doha.
Larry Elder said it best: “We have forever wars because we have forever enemies.” The aphorism is lost on many talking heads and politicians across the political spectrum, including Biden and . . . Trump.
Last night, I couldn’t take it anymore. The Fox News primetime lineup were all in for a bugout. The only difference them and Biden on the abandonment of Afghanistan is the pace. They wanted a scheduled bugout and Biden carried out a precipitous one. Lost in all the barking was something Elder quickly understood. Our forever enemies hate us, want to extinguish us, and are in it for the long haul to construct a worldwide caliphate. The belief is central to their identity. Taliban/Al-Qaeda leaders have repeatedly said, even during the negotiations,
“One day mujahedeen will have victory and Islamic law will come not just to Afghanistan, but all over the world. We are not in a hurry. We believe it will come one day. Jihad will not end until the last day.”
They won’t be satisfied till we are like them in burqas, beards, prayer rugs, sandals, and the 8th century. I was so disgusted that I flipped to the Smithsonian Channel.
Let’s clear away some deadwood to logic. One is the chimera of the Taliban and A-Qaeda as distinct entities. They aren’t for practical and operational purposes. One 2020 UN report put it succinctly:
“Relations between the Taliban, especially the Haqqani Network, and Al-Qaida remain close, based on friendship, a history of shared struggle, ideological sympathy and intermarriage. The Taliban regularly consulted with Al-Qaida during negotiations with the United States and offered guarantees that it would honour their historical ties.”
I’m not a fan of much that comes out of Turtle Bay, but this got it right, probably because it’s too well known in intelligence circles to refute. Think of Al-Qaeda as the Taliban’s Quds Force (of Islamic Republic of Iran fame, and once headed by Soleimani, now dead, thank God).
That’s who the Trump people were negotiating with. Many of the people sitting across the table from Trump’s negotiators in 2018 to 2020 were Al-Qaeda under the Taliban flag, which was well known throughout. Many of our adversaries wear two hats than can be switched with a flick of the wrist.
Taliban/Al-Qaeda fighters in Kandahar, August 13, 2021.
Good faith gestures in negotiations with people who want to kill, convert, and replace you is the height of folly. Leading up to the Trump/Taliban/Al-Qaeda “peace” agreement in Doha on February 29, 2020, was an officially-sanctioned jailbreak of 5,000 Taliban/Al-Qaeda prisoners. All returned to the fight to kill Americans and friendly Afghans. Two examples among many should suffice. The Taliban commander of Helmand province, Mawlavi Talib, was one of those set free. Even worse, the Taliban head, Abdul Ghani Baradar, was in custody for years in Pakistan till Trump asked for his “good faith” release in a bribe to the Taliban to let us bugout. Today, word is that Baradar is residing in Kabul’s presidential palace.
Mawlavi Talib (center) in Kabul, August 15, 2021? I can’t tell.
Trump consummated the diplomatic abortion, and Biden carried it out precipitously and with gusto. Despicable, absolutely despicable.
Most despicable was the collective amnesia over the real reasons for the 2001 invasion. It wasn’t only as our incontinent president put it yesterday when he limited the justification to removing the Taliban from power and the killing of Osama bin-Laden. Preemption was on the lips of officialdom in DC in the heady days after 9/11. Preemption means to forestall this from happening again: take over the rats’ nest, clear it out, and continually hunt down those foolish enough to be later recruited to kill Americans. Like them, we have to be in it for the long haul, something not well understood by our last two presidents, if not the last three if the myopic Obama is included.
So, we’ve come to this pass. The Taliban/Al-Qaeda are back in the seat of power, ready to continue their bloody evangelism. India, Taiwan, our allies, the signers of the Abraham accords, and Israel must be wondering if they’re going to be the next victim of an American bugout. The goatherders-with-a-cause will be emboldened, and get fresh video for recruitment of the next generation of suicidal killers.
Thank you, Biden . . . with Trump as your enabler.
RogerG
*Thanks to the reporting of Jim Geraghty and Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review.
Pres. Trump and National Security Adviser John Bolton
In the spat with the ousted John Bolton as National Security Adviser, Trump responded to Bolton by saying “guys like Bolton and others wanted to go into Iraq and that didn’t work out too well.” Leaving aside the fact that Bush and Petraeus had succeeded in stabilizing Iraq by September 2008, and Obama cut-and-ran in 2014, Trump exposes his selective memory and bent for near-isolationism. His approach to foreign affairs is a combination of bluster and bluff (“Rocket Man”, “We’ll respond with the likes of nothing you’ve ever seen before”), patronizing niceties as if he’s talking to a municipal planning board (“They’ve got tremendous potential”, etc.), and finding excuses not to use the US military that he boasts so much about. Trump sounds more like Charles Lindbergh and his 1940 America First Committee than Ronald Reagan. Trump is the one who refuses to see the bear in this Reagan campaign ad from 1984 (see below).
The bear ad came to mind after reading Jim Geraghty’s piece in National Review, “The Missing Word in Trump’s Call: ‘Russia’” (Read the article here). The phone transcript between Trump and Zelensky should be read with the pall of Russian aggression against Ukraine overhanging the conversation. It certainly was on the mind of Zelensky as his country is being dismembered by Russia, if it wasn’t in Trump’s head. The Ukraine is at the mercy of American military aid, since the bureaucratic pacifism of the European Union makes it a eunuch and the poor country is geographically isolated. The president talks about his personal squabbles with malevolent Democrats in the conversation as Zelensky’s Ukraine is invaded. I would think that Zelensky is at a severe disadvantage. Thus, he responds with the equivalent of “Yes, yes, Mr. President, yes …”
The crazy Democrats’ serial drive for impeachment and the president’s narrow focus on the never-ending domestic assaults against him must make the American political scene seem like kabuki theater to the guy at the other end of Trump’s phone line. We, Americans, are missing a more serious picture. Back to the bear ad and Lindbergh’s America First Committee, another pall should overhang Trump’s current management of our foreign relations. It’s the tumbling dominoes of the Rhineland (1936), the Anschluss (1938), Czechoslovakia (1938), and Poland (1939).
The Anschluss with Austria, 1938.
A zigzagging foreign policy careening from bluster and bluff to excuse-mongering inaction as we deal with thug countries like North Korea, Iran, and China is a disaster-in-waiting. The measure of success should not be the number of wars avoided but are we any safer and our interests protected.
Besides, the choices aren’t between a boots-on-the-ground invasion and the diplomacy of “All You Need is Love”. Whether Trump likes it or not, the US on the international scene corresponds to the high school Dean of Students. No, we’re not the cop but we are the disciplinarian of last resort. And by discipline, I don’t mean nation-building. To borrow from 19th century, there’s such a thing as “butcher and bolt”. Go in, smash ’em, and get out, as in Operation Praying Mantis from 1988.
An aerial view of the Iranian frigate IS ALVAND (71) burning after being attacked by aircraft of Carrier Air Wing 11 in retaliation for the mining of the guided missile frigate USS SAMUEL B. ROBERTS (FFG 58).
Oh, but Trump might still insist that we aren’t the world’s policeman. Okay then, Trump, continue you’re blustery bluffs followed by artful dodging on inaction. A new set of dominoes is being set up. It may take awhile but the ministries in Pyongyang, Tehran, and Beijing, and any erstwhile two-bit thug, are taking notes. A principle from ancient Rome applies: If you want peace, prepare for war. I would like to add a corollary: And be prepared to occasionally use it to make it real. If not, inaction comes at a bigger price later. Unless, of course, you claim the power to repeal human nature and assert that it never had a role and never will. Now that would qualify as sheer fantasy.
Trump, drop the America First Committee shtick as you fight off the loons in the Democratic Party.
